Monday, June 12, 2006

A very common complaint among healing classes is that upgrading their gear only helps them in one area of the game: raiding. This is in contrast to the DPS classes, where raid gear is often just as good for PvP and farming as it is for raiding.

Perhaps stepping back a bit will provide some perspective. As a caster levels, you often find gear with very specific bonuses: +Fire, +Frost, +Shadow, +Arcane, +Heal. However, as you get closer and closer to 60, the more specific bonuses tend to get subsumed into +damage/heal. At 60, there are essentially only two categories of gear that makes your spells more powerful: +damage/heal, and +heal.

So the gear naturally gets split up into two categories. Damage casters go for +damage/heal, while healers go for +heal. The problem, though, is that +heal does not help you pvp or solo. So healers would also like some +damage/heal gear to make them more effective in non-raiding situations. This starts fights with the damage casters who see +damage/heal as their gear, and healers being in less "need" of it.

Now, imagine if +heal had also disappeared as endgame approached. Or that you wake up tomorrow and every +heal bonus on epic items has been replaced by the equivalent (lower) amount of +damage/heal. What would that change? Obviously, healing spells would be significantly reduced in power. But now healer gear, such as class sets, help in all situations. There is no longer a divide between damage casters and healers, there are only casters. All of whom get the same rights as each other.

Honestly, I think that this would be a much better situation than what we have now. But it would probably be a lot of work to try to retune all the boss encounters to work with a reduced amount of +damage/heal. As unfortunate as it sounds, the best hope is to wait for the Burning Crusade expansion. In BC, Blizzard should phase out +heal as people reach level 70, much like they phased out +fire or +shadow. Then at level 70, all casters will be using +damage/heal, which will allow them to be effective in all areas of the game.

Posted by
Rohan

5 comments:

That would be nice, to do away with +Heal and just give everyone +Spells (if you will, like Hunters can use +AP on a sword to help their ranged?!) because that truly would open up the game some for the hybrids. Shamans have specific damage spells to cast and those benefit from +Damage. They have an entire Talent Tree, Elemental, that makes them casters that really can do DPS if given the chance.

For a Shaman otherwise wearing Earthfury, this belt nearly doubled their +Damage. "But why?" others, as good in PvP as in PvE and raiding, asked. "You're supposed to be in back dropping totems, particularly Mana Tide, and healing."

The Tier 3 armor was very disappointing to see. All the +Damage that was found in the Tier 1, and even more found in the Tier 2, appears to be gone. Replaced by +Healing. That effectively makes the Shamans nothing more than Priests in Mail armor with a different set/manner of buffs and decurses.

I'm not raiding for the time being, having moved ahead of my guild by 6 hours, but I've got 8/8 Earthfury so I can put out the healing when I need to, and I've got some nice enhancement gear like the Bloodstained Hauberk from ZG and the Black Brood Pauldrons from BWL, when I need to melee. Going more solo, PvE, it'll be a godsend to be Enhancement, once again, and have some decent Enhancement gear.

But, as you said, +Spells (Damage and/or Healing) would go a long way to opening up choices for some folks. Maybe Shammy's more than Pally's since the Shammy's seem to have a "Caster Tree" that the Pally's don't. (Is that correct? I've only played a Pally up to level 25 so don't really know much about their spell casting dps potential.)

They changed us up in 1.9. Our damage Seals now get a larger benefit from +Damage/Heal gear. So a lot of paladins prefer +Damage/Heal because it boosts both damage and healing. A lot of our itemization has also changed to reflect this (Plate of the Shaman King is actually good now).

I believe that, for the most part, +AP boosts damage more, and +Heal boosts healing more, but +Damage/Heal is a nice compromise.